With the development of network technology and substantial increase of network communication capacity, the demands on the performance of a transport network become increasingly higher, through imparting intelligent attributes to an optical network by means of adding an automatically controlled protocol in the optical domain, it is expected to make the network architecture more flexible, the network management flexible and uniform, bandwidth utilization ratio higher, survivability and expansibility stronger, and make the network be capable of providing dynamic connection and intelligent scheduling, thus an Automatically Switched Optical Network (ASON) is developed to satisfy the above demands.
The ASON consists of a control plane, a transport plane, a Data Communication Network (DCN) and a management plane.
The ASON embodies functional separation of the control plane from the transport plane, wherein the control plane is responsible for establishing connections in the transport plane through a signaling routing mechanism and performing re-routing recovery when the connection fails, while the transport plane is responsible for service transmission and failure detection. The DCN is responsible for the transmission of the signaling routing messages in the control plane. The management plane is responsible for performing configuration management of the control plane and the transport plane.
Under the condition that the service routing in the ASON is provided by a multiplex section shared protection ring, a node failure or a multi-span section failure in the multiplex section shared protection ring may result in the occurrence of service error connection. At this moment, the transport plane is required to prevent error by configuring path error handling information, e.g. preventing error through a Trace Identification Mismatch (TIM) alarm generated by a path trace byte (Jx byte). In this way, the control plane may take subsequent measures (e.g. re-routing) according to the actual failure state of the service. To make it brief, “configure Jx bytes” and “configure error handling information” have the same meaning herein.
The control plane realizes automatic configuration based on the technology of connection-error handling of the transport plane. Currently, error handling is performed through configuring a Jx byte alarm in the transport plane connection-error handling technology.
In the conventional method for connection-error handling, configuration is performed by the management plane in the transport plane, thus the efficiency is low and rapid automatic configuration cannot be realized. For example, when recovery occurs in the service, if this case is reported to the management plane and then a Jx byte is set, the recovery time cannot be ensured, which makes the recovery meaningless. Thus, it is required to configure the Jx byte in time so as to guarantee normality of the service. It is essential to realize a rapid, automatic and safe configuration in the ASON. However, currently there is a lack of technologies related to connection-error handling in the field of ASON